In the negatives
I am soooo not looking forward to the coming week…
Currently listening to:
Kent
Hagnesta Hill
Now Reading
Uncategorized
Radio Ballet
Me and my love on a Sunday night.
Currently listening to:
Eluvium
Copia
Drove through ghosts to get here
Last week, the tiles on the kitchen floor started to swell, as if there was an octopus lurking underneath, trying to get out (even though I know that octopuses… octupii?… can fit thru a bottle’s neck. Saw it on National Geogrphic years ago. Fucking amazing, those creatures! I am quite obsessed with them). Then followed a strange sound, and suddenly the cement holding the tiles together started to crumble. Ah, construction in Qatar. At first glance everything looks ok, but the truth is that buildings, and their finishings, are put together haphazardly. I’ll bet that in 10 years most of the buildings here will start crumbling.
This afternoon I took a nap, which lasted 5 hours. I woke up because of my bad driving. In my dream, I was driving à la Qatari — recklessly. My sister was with me and I was breaking about a hundred and twenty rules of Safe Driving. What really woke me up though, was when I overtook another car and found myself at a stoplight (of course, it was red, and contrary to my earlier driving, I actually stopped). The road was titled at a crazy angle; it was a slope, but we were practically vertical, the car almost tipping over backwards. Panicked, I realised that I didn’t know how to handle slopes (which is crazy, because I aced the hanging part in the driving exam, where you stop and restart the car at a slope). I was yelling at my sister, my foot frozen on the brakes, knowing that we were going to tip over. She was teasing me, saying “You mean you don’t know? You mean we’re going to hit the car behind us?” and finally she pulled up the handbrake, but my foot still wouldn’t leave the brake.
There are a thousand interpretations for this dream but I’m too bored to even think about them. My mind, it’s mush. It’s filled with work and music and the biography of Marie Antoinette (which I’m reading right now, and it’s fucking brilliant!). And my body feels different — I blame Julien, who is currently in this Healthy Zone Bubble. I find myself in the gym more and more, even though I pass my time on the treadmill raising various existential questions, the most popular being, What’s The Point Of Running When The Goal Is Unknown And I’m Not Really Moving And Anyway I Know I’ll Never Get There?
***
The area where I live is under constant, irritating, massive construction. Actually, ever since we arrived at the West Bay area, practically half of the streets have been under heavy travaux. Orange cones protect nonsense construction (for example, there has been a hole in the middle of the sidewalk that hasn’t been closed for months – and in this hole is a ladder… that leads to nothing but soil. Existential questions, all over again…), and now the roundabout leading to City Center has been closed (it’s being replaced with stoplights, finally), leaving clueless drivers to navigate themselves thru a maze of diversions, which blatantly lack the appropriate arrows and road signs.
It’s madness! No wonder I’ve been dreaming of reckless driving.
***
In response to all the hysteria, I plug my ears with math rock.
Currently listening to:
65daysofstatic
One Time for All Time
Paris
I haven’t forgotten how beautiful this city is, but being here is different from remembering what it’s like. Like yesterday, when I was in the Metro, I found myself reverting to the old habits, like automatically boarding the second carriage, and taking the foldable seat next to the door. I realised how nice it was to people watch, wondering what people were thinking, making up stories of where this person was going and what kind of book he/she liked to read. Or like yesterday, at the bus stop, some people were smoking and stamping their feet to shrug off the cold, and the smell of the cold and the smoke reminded me of those winters when Julien and I would walk to the nearest tabac in the snow to buy cigs.
It started to rain as I walked to the metro station from Julien’s grandmother’s flat. I passed that little store that sells second-hand Japanese goods, then turned the corner and passed the Korean store, and looked over the building tops to see the Eiffel Tower against a backdrop of gray clouds.
I walked all the way to Rue du Commerce and had lunch at a Chinese traiteur. I sort of missed the taste of the Frenchified Chinese food, which is what I used to eat all the time when I was living in Paris and couldn’t be bothered to cook.
And then I went to a local Monoprix, where I made a tour of the aisles and found myself remembering our usual grocery list… the grilled chicken that come in those paper packs, the jambon cru, the saucisson, the crab sticks.
Browsing the alcohol section, I marveled at how different countries and cultures can be, and how we slowly adapt to wherever it is we find ourselves in, no matter how hard we try to resist. I guess that when you move around quite a bit like we do, you don’t really lose a home, but end up adding a new one to the list.
Sleek
For my birthday, Julien offered me the sleekest and most beautiful thing in the world – not Johnny Depp (although how I wish it were him…) but an 80 gb iPod. I still can’t get my head around the 80 gb part. I mean, that’s four trillion songs!
As you can imagine, the evenings have been spent exclusively on transferring all our music to iTunes.
I’m beginning to like Apple.
Currently listening to:
Otis Redding
Remember Me
Cesspools of imagination
In a way, during certain days I’m a bit sad that there always seems to be a word for a certain mood. Even the unexplainable was given a name : ambivalence. And while I’ve always loved the word, I now see it as a coward’s way of putting into words what one cannot put into words.
So if you’re all perceptive, or sensitive, or imaginative, as hell, I shall be happy to describe to you how Jul was in the picture he sent. To start off, the picture was grainy. Almost as if it were purposely underexposed during processing, like when we used to make those test exposure strips on Kodak paper in the laboratory during photography class. But the colour of the photograph isn’t coffee. instead, it’s tea with too much water. His head rests against his palm, and his fingers are through his hair, which looks recently cut. His eyes are too dark in the picture for expression (dark enough for speculation of what’s going on inside, but only for speculation), but where he’s looking at seems derailing. I cannot figure out if he was looking directly at the camera or if he was vaguely aware that the shot was being taken. Obviously, one waits for a camera shot, but a few seconds before the flash takes off you lose your firm expression and for a few milliseconds you’re caught looking offguard. (Recovery is a must, if you’re really flexible and keen)
Because he was leaning against his hand, his cheek was creased in an upward motion, and that motion looked very slow. He has a slight beard in the picture, obviously hadn’t bothered to shave for days. Hadn’t bothered or hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared to do so (there are plenty of options). One corner of his mouth is tilted upward, as if he’d just had a sarcastic thought, or a secret. He isn’t slouching, he’s just leaning. Probably against the couch. Or somewhere that’s perfect for leaning. Or just as uncomfortable for leaning.
